Somewhere Beyond the Sea (Cerulean #2) by T.J. Klune

Somewhere Beyond the Sea is the hugely anticipated sequel to TJ Klune’s The House in the Cerulean Sea, one of the best-loved and best-selling fantasy novels of the past decade. Featuring gorgeous orange sprayed edges!

A magical house. A secret past. A summons that could change everything.

Arthur Parnassus lives a good life built on the ashes of a bad one.

He’s the master of a strange orphanage on a distant and peculiar island, and he hopes to soon be the adoptive father to the six dangerous and magical children who live there.

Arthur works hard and loves with his whole heart so none of the children ever feel the neglect and pain that he once felt as an orphan on that very same island so long ago. He is not alone: joining him is the love of his life, Linus Baker, a former caseworker in the Department In Charge of Magical Youth. And there’s the island’s sprite, Zoe Chapelwhite, and her girlfriend, Mayor Helen Webb. Together, they will do anything to protect the children.

But when Arthur is summoned to make a public statement about his dark past, he finds himself at the helm of a fight for the future that his family, and all magical people, deserve.

And when a new magical child hopes to join them on their island home—one who finds power in calling himself monster, a name that Arthur worked so hard to protect his children from—Arthur knows they’re at a breaking point: their family will either grow stronger than ever or fall apart.

Welcome back to Marsyas Island. This is Arthur’s story.

Somewhere Beyond the Sea is a story of resistance, lovingly told, about the daunting experience of fighting for the life you want to live and doing the work to keep it.

I wish I could say I loved this book as much as I did the previous one, but I can’t. Maybe because, oddly enough, I found the characters less real this time around. Arthur and Linus are constantly going on about how much they love each other, which is fine every once in a while but not all the time. And I found the children’s passages a bit too saccharine, as if Klune doesn’t know any children to base them on (though he hit it more on the mark in the first book.) Not to belabor the point, but he might try reading some King to see how it’s done.

I did enjoy a lot of the book, mostly when Arthur was interacting with the people of the village. They added some realism. I wish they had had larger roles since learning to live in the rest of the world seemed to be a major issue.

And I was somewhat disappointed with the ending. I kept waiting for a real crisis but things came to a head very quickly and the ending was rather flat. As much as Klune belabored how the people from DICOMY were terrible people who didn’t accept those who were different, their role is actually quite small.

Still, I enjoyed returning to Marsyas Island, warts and all.




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18. Somewhere Beyond the Sea (Cerulean #2) by T.J. Klune